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Can Music Reveal Your Mind? Music as the language of connection with Elle Spencer-Lewis
34 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, musician, composer, and technologist Elle Spencer-Lewis explores how music nurtures us, offers healing, and serves as a playful gateway to self-discovery. Drawing from her work in immersive interactive installations and neurofeedback experiments, Elle discusses how our innate musicality connects us at a deep, evolutionary level. We dive into cutting-edge projects-from video game inspired interactive cubes to brainwave sonification that challenge our perceptions of creativity, wellness, and digital design, all while addressing pressing questions around biometric data privacy.
Themes in this episode:
- Healing Power of Music & Creative Agency: How music provides emotional support, fosters self-acceptance, and encourages us to play and let go of judgment.
- Innate Musicality & Identity: Embracing the idea that we are innately musical beings—a connection that spans from lullabies and war chants to everyday expressions of creativity.
- Interactive Experiences & Gamification: The transformation of music into an immersive, interactive experience, where participation turns into a playful exploration of sound and self.
- Music, Neuroscience, and Wellness: The pioneering use of EEG and neurofeedback to sonify brainwaves, allowing individuals to see and shape their inner states for mindfulness and therapeutic benefits.
- Digital Transformation & Design for Now: Navigating the new frontier of digital interactivity, where technology both enhances our connection to music and raises important questions about data privacy and security.
Shownotes:
- Elle Spencer-Lewis – Emmy-nominated composer, music producer, and technologist whose work reimagines interactive musical experiences:
- Circuitry of Life by Red Bull at Night – An immersive, four-story interactive cube that explores the evolution from analog to digital and its impact on human connection
- The Quantified Self Movement – Explore how people are using technology to track and understand their personal data, including brainwaves and other biometric signals
- Neurofeedback Explained – An accessible overview of neurofeedback, its benefits, and how it works to enhance focus and relaxation
- Biometric Data Privacy – Learn about the challenges and best practices for protecting your biometric data in an increasingly digital world
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guests
00:00:06
Speaker
How can we approach the rapid pace of technological change given the slow moving nature of spiritual growth? I'm your host, Peter Wolf. I'm a traveler, writer, and coach and formerly an engineer now living in Berlin.
00:00:26
Speaker
Well, maybe this brings us to our first guest on this inaugural podcast. Emily, you introduced me to Elle, and maybe you want to say a little bit more about why you thought I should have a conversation with her.
00:00:38
Speaker
Yes. Yes, I do. Yes, I would like to say that. I met Elle at a gallery opening in l la probably about 15 years ago. I had just moved back there from Edinburgh and I remember we had a conversation about philosophy and it was only later on that I saw her perform her own music and I learned that she was working on an album and she was a musician.
Elle's Musical Journey and Philosophy
00:01:01
Speaker
and And to bring it back to the Vocalize project in l LA, i think it's so unusual for somebody to lead with who they are and philosophically how they think rather than with what they do. And I really appreciated that.
00:01:15
Speaker
when I first met her. And at the same time, what she does is so intrinsically connected to who she is. She's dedicated her life in various ways to music. She lived in Dublin and busked on the street. She studied songwriting at the l LA Music Academy.
00:01:33
Speaker
She's toured Europe doing house shows and small concerts. And for many years, she's taught instruments and voice to school-aged kids in LA.
00:01:44
Speaker
So it's a passion for her and it's in her all the time and as a livelihood as well as an identity. And she follows music anywhere that it takes her.
Impact of Music on Brain and Society
00:01:56
Speaker
She also started getting interested in how music affects the brain and how to use music as a way to change people's minds and help them participate collectively in decision-making. I thought this would be fun for you to talk to her about, Peter, because you also have a music production background and music is so integral to how you see the world as well.
00:02:16
Speaker
Let's not forget we're here in Berlin, which is the home of techno music, which is atrocious, by the way. Hot take. ah But um I think it's a very fitting place to begin a techno spiritual journey.
00:02:31
Speaker
And I just like to make it clear that this podcast is not about techno music. It's not excluding it either. And actually in a future episode, you can hear ah little bit more about that. I think we've set the scene here. So why don't we get started with our interview with Elle?
00:02:45
Speaker
Yes, let's do it. Let's do it now.
00:02:50
Speaker
So i'd like to ask you the question then from the present moment, who are you right now? At the very present, I am very luckily immersed in nature for my two front windows here.
Current Projects in Music and Technology
00:03:05
Speaker
And i am thinking about ways to bring immersive experiences into people's lives in such a way that there's storytelling, that the tech isn't obtrusive I don't know whether I would say it's an invisible, but um in such a way that it builds meaningful memories for people and builds agency, enables agency for people.
00:03:34
Speaker
So that technology is aren't something to be scared of necessarily. It's something that people feel like they might be able to grapple with. So I'm really concerned about that in my life, particularly because I'm dealing with children.
00:03:50
Speaker
I think we'll have a good conversation for the next little while. and one of the aspects that I know you for is your work as a composer and a musician. And I think you bring a lot of that meaning that you just shared into your your music making.
00:04:04
Speaker
i just also wanted to share that I also worked more as a music producer. And i was inspired to do that because listening to music dancing with music, playing music, whether it's an instrument or singing, can be very therapeutic.
00:04:20
Speaker
And what I found when I was starting to play with music, especially in a group context, is that the music is a kind of language of connection. It was really this connection as a healing property that I was focused on with offering music or producing music or having people engage with music.
00:04:39
Speaker
So one artifact of that passion of mine was the Voice of Life project in which people could hum along, sing along, improvise in some way to improve health and wellness.
00:04:51
Speaker
It seems like you're exploring a similar frontier. who How has music helped you grow on your personal journey? Um, everything from how am i going to get through this day?
00:05:07
Speaker
And when I'm teaching music, music always carries me through. I just think, I'm so exhausted. How am I going to do this? I don't, I don't know whether I have much left in the tank.
00:05:19
Speaker
And then I discover that the music always carries me through. the importance of putting your ladle in the, in the underground river, dipping into sort of the unknown within oneself and exploring that daily is, I think, one of the things that brings my life the most richness.
00:05:40
Speaker
um But I really think people need a space in order to play for a minute because that's all it is. We have a layer of socialization that causes us to judge our output almost immediately and And what I would say to my students and the great thing about music is that music doesn't care if you make a mistake, because the moment you stop to say, hey, I made a mistake, you've stopped playing music.
00:06:08
Speaker
And that's what music cares about. Don't stop playing me. Keep playing me. You know, maybe the mistakes don't need to be called attention to. They're not important or as important as we've been led to believe.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, it speaks so much to, I think, this switch that happened somewhere along the line where music was something that we innately participated in, or it was that something that became part of our culture and community. And then somewhere along the line, it became about performance.
00:06:39
Speaker
And then we start to worry about mistakes. And that yeah that really is ah barrier. And I love how you referred to, at the beginning, saying that like a dipping into a ladle into ah well or into something. the underground river.
00:06:55
Speaker
The underground river. You could say that we're connected
Interactive Music Projects
00:06:59
Speaker
to that. We just have to practice or find a way to dip into that. who um Just a moment.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we've been musical for about 20 million years. The reason we rockw walk upright is because we can keep a beat, which very few animals can't. Chimpanzees can't do that.
00:07:19
Speaker
By the way, our closest relative can't do this. Some birds can can keep a beat, not all of them. um We have the same circuitry as songbirds. I don't believe that ah chimpanzees have that.
00:07:31
Speaker
So we are innately musical. Music is the reason that we're here. It's the reason that we can pitch our voices up and down, that you can understand the difference between me asking a question and being sarcastic um is the pitch of my voice as I'm speaking, my intonation.
00:07:46
Speaker
So it is very much embedded in our identity and our survival as human beings. You know, we were able to communicate so that we could live in larger groups, just like an atomic family. We had to live in groups of 60 or more in order to survive. We're not the biggest apes on the block there.
00:08:06
Speaker
So being smart doesn't really help you when you're still trying to run away from a saber-toothed tiger, unless you can coordinate something humans. a larger group.
00:08:17
Speaker
So, um and i I, I don't think that that evolved entirely for competition or just trying to kill things. I think that, you know, was there to raise children and to pass along information in such a way that it wouldn't be forgotten. So music plays a huge role in all of those things as you be from Maori war groups,
00:08:37
Speaker
chants and dancing to um to lullabies to the ABCs where we sing to our children and poems that were sung to be passed down to generations. So it's so much of our identity as as human beings that it seemed to me to be an underutilized resource that many people felt they didn't have access to that.
00:09:02
Speaker
But I think, you know, we think of mindfulness, meditation, all these types of things, meeting the self, seeing that, having that reflective moment is something that enhances our our health, our growth.
00:09:15
Speaker
And I find this is one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you because here on one hand, you are talking about the depths of music and what it can provide personally or to your students.
00:09:26
Speaker
Yet on the other hand, Here you are managing interactive experiences. Maybe you can share with us, how did these two things start to cross?
00:09:37
Speaker
Or how did you get started working more with the the interactive technology side along with music? Sure. I got pulled into a marvelous project by a friend of mine. Well, I started looking into music for video games and sort of one person led to another. And I wound up on a project for Red Bull.
00:10:02
Speaker
creating an interactive 40 by 40 by 40 foot cube that we put on top of the stock exchange building downtown that had interactive walls.
00:10:14
Speaker
And um it was a story. So it was a story of analog to digital. And we started off on their stairwells on either side. And what ended up happening was that people on either side of the staircase each walked stair was a different sound on a drum machine and the other side was the synthesizer which all the different pitches for each stair we didn't know what would happen and that experience was gamified so beautifully that people just uh it takes a lot of tweaking to do this but people just started to play and they didn't quite realize when the dj music ended and when their music
00:10:54
Speaker
people playing started and they ended up playing for about 45 minutes spontaneously. So that was, that was my introduction. but after that, ah my friend gave me a project that he'd been working on with a neuroscientist, which was a visualization of the brain.
00:11:11
Speaker
And at the time it was a visualization of a brain musician playing. So it was really like a 3D model of the brain and you could see neurons firing and ah what they had sonified was, you know, just sort of um frequency map to frequency. So it really sounded like like your brainwaves sonified. That's more or less what it would sound like.
00:11:34
Speaker
um I like to call it like an army of theremins. um So my friend said to me, do you think you could do something with music? And I'm like, i can do something with music. ah And that led to a whole exploration of giving people access, direct access to their innate musicality through neurofeedback. And we've talked about this reflection of the self, and that's essentially what neurofeedback is.
00:12:00
Speaker
And it's a reflection of the self or a reflection of one's agency over a particular set of parameters and those parameters happened to be auditory and and and visual in a gamified way.
00:12:16
Speaker
And when I was on tour, the comment that I got the most when I would come off stage and people will come up to talk to me is they they wanted to say I had a great time, it was a great concert, but really what they wanted to say was I only sing in the shower. Oh, I wish I was a musician like you. Or I played piano for a while, but then I gave it up. I was no good at it.
00:12:37
Speaker
I heard that over and over and over again. And that was really what people wanted to share. They wanted to share their pain of the moment or the moments where they have decided that they are not musical enough.
00:12:50
Speaker
And so one starts to think, what if everybody did feel like they had access to their musicality in such a way that they felt they had agency over it and that they could create social connection with it or participate in it in in such a way that made them feel less alone and made them feel more creative.
00:13:14
Speaker
Absolutely. That's that... being less alone because you're connected, it doesn't require a level of skill. and just requires the active participation.
00:13:24
Speaker
you know i think there's also something magical that happens in that group. You find a new level of rhythm, of skill. I mean, I've certainly done that for drumming with a large group of people. like i I was drumming rhythms that wasn't connected to thinking.
00:13:42
Speaker
you know yeah You're just yeah um immersed in a sound field that Well, it's profound experience of connection. If people that have been in a drum circle have experienced that before.
00:13:53
Speaker
Carries you along. And I think, you know, so what's one of things that's fascinating is that we can have these very profound musical experiences. We allow ourselves to get past our, whatever self judgments we have.
00:14:06
Speaker
um I think this has been happening with music and dance for a long time, but now in this technological age, You're talking about things that we didn't have before.
00:14:18
Speaker
these are modern inventions when we try to like scan the brain or see the brainwave activity. If you're trying to sonify rain waves and the the project that you got involved in, it's a new way of perceiving or it's like, oh, maybe it changes my perception of what it is.
00:14:38
Speaker
Perhaps there's more access to um music in this new way.
EEG and Music Interaction
00:14:43
Speaker
but I'm really curious, like what... Given that it is something new, what do you think is the most compelling impact about that connection between music and being able to see the activity of the brain? being able see I should walk this backwards so that they understand what the mechanism is.
00:15:01
Speaker
You wear an EEG headset which picks up the electrical impulses going on inside your brain. And then we stratify that frequency range into what people might be familiar with hearing is a alpha, beta, delta, gamma, theta ranges that are associated with different neurological activities such as focus, relaxing, dreaming, um meditative states.
00:15:29
Speaker
Gamma waves are extremely fast and extremely noisy, so we're still figuring out what's going on with those, but they are associated with longer periods and more frequent meditators often have much higher power of gamma um frequency throughout their brain. It's a communicator in that it goes throughout the brain, whereas alpha waves might be concentrated in one area.
00:15:53
Speaker
Anyway, so you get the picture that we're able through a headset to, you know, stick electrodes on your head that read the electrical energy and translate that into frequency ranges that we have noticed certain behaviors are associated with.
00:16:08
Speaker
And through that, what I do is I map that into a program that takes that data and visualizes those frequency ranges.
00:16:19
Speaker
And from there, i put those into packets of time that I evaluate. So in one second, I might see the alpha brainwave peak at a certain level and dip to a certain level.
00:16:34
Speaker
And that gives me some data information whereby i can show that to the wearer of the headset audibly and visually. And if I give them a way that they can maybe try to repeat that or do it again, then it gamifies it and it gives them a way of actually getting better at increasing their alpha brainwaves. So well why would we want to do that?
00:16:58
Speaker
ah Alpha waves in particular are suppressive brainwaves. They allow us to focus and concentrate. If we didn't have alpha waves sort of canceling out a lot of other things, we'd be like you know eightydd times a thousand. We wouldn't be able to focus on anything like a sound. I wouldn't be able to focus on your voice. I'd be I'd be hearing all of the other things going on. I'd be looking at everything all at once and not able to focus on you.
00:17:23
Speaker
right So if you can get skilled at these things, like you can get skilled at stilling some of the thoughts in meditation or even slowing down your heartbeat. um And I think it's, you know, we we think to ourselves, well, how can I control my brain waves?
00:17:39
Speaker
But we can control our breathing. We can control our heart rate. we can even control our our state of being, our mood, whether we feel relaxed and whether we feel sort of at rest or whether we feel anxious and agitated.
00:17:59
Speaker
Not always easy to do, but we do have the power to do it. And so the project I'm working on called Synapsity is a way of making music with your mind. So using that data to create notes that then you have agency over.
00:18:15
Speaker
So it's not just a reflection of notes built on your brainwaves as they're happening. You can definitely hear that, but there is a way for you to use that experience to engender a more focused state that the music then reflects or a more relaxed state that the music then reflects.
00:18:36
Speaker
so Is it like that you're... you're able to build a ah vocabulary, if you will, of like, oh, these alpha waves or alpha brainwaves are associated with this particular sound.
00:18:48
Speaker
who And so i might be able to, oh, I i think I'll have a little bit and more of that sound. A little bit more of that. and And yeah, everybody's brain is a little different. Everybody's going to react a little bit differently.
00:19:01
Speaker
And I found that the sounds have to be quite simple in order for people to know what it is they're listening to and know what they have agency over. But eventually, the complexity of the music can build as you get further along in time and you start to understand what it is that you're doing and you're training your mind to react in such a way that's the desired result, I
Music, Creativity, and Self-Discovery
00:19:24
Speaker
suppose.
00:19:24
Speaker
where you can just float along and let it happen. But that's the reflective moment I was talking about. To your question, that gives people a whole new way to experience their state of being and what they're capable of.
00:19:41
Speaker
I mean, it's it's a very vulnerable state, especially when you can see your own brainwaves. It's very much like a, like a, like a, just unpeeling to see your inner processes and in real time. l Yeah.
00:19:54
Speaker
You know, um, I live in Berlin now, but you know, before I lived in San Francisco and maybe it was eight years ago, you know, when Fitbits are, were all the rage or we're just becoming a rage, you know, and the quantified human, the quantified self, a big what technology, ah yeah, a big technology play.
00:20:14
Speaker
And so this is why, okay, I can through smart devices, monitor my heart rate, my breathing rate, all these kinds of things. So in a way, you're adding brainwaves to the mix. So that's another thing.
00:20:31
Speaker
But if I can maybe have a fun and creative way to interact with the data, that that's something new. And it sounds like that's what you're doing with the brainwaves. I mean, we could just get the data and report report the data.
00:20:47
Speaker
This is how much you were are in alpha. This is how much you are beta. And there are devices that do that. today, but you're saying, well, no, let's, let's create an engaging experience that people would want to have some agency.
00:21:02
Speaker
Right, a way of exploring the creative self. I think this was Kurt Vonnegut who said this, something like this. I'm going to paraphrase and I'm going to get it wrong. But something like ah he was, I forget who it was he was speaking to. was about 16 at the time.
00:21:18
Speaker
ah And I think he was interning with an archaeologist. And the archaeologist said to him, so you know so what do you do? What what do you like to do? do said, well, you know, I... I did a little bit of music, but I wasn't very good at it. i I tried writing, and ah but you know i i i i kind of failed at that too.
00:21:36
Speaker
i i i like to draw, but you know my drawings are terrible. And so we went through this sort of list. Yeah, i wasn't so great at sports. you know um ah and And so i I've sort of failed at everything. And the and the archaeologist said, well,
00:21:52
Speaker
Things that you enjoy aren't meant to be won. The whole point of doing them is not to win. There's no winning. you're You're doing it or you're not doing it. You're enjoying it or you're not enjoying it.
00:22:06
Speaker
And apparently that idea changes life. Certainly ah it seems to have influenced his writing. And I think of my project is the same way.
00:22:17
Speaker
It's gamified, but there's no necessary win state. I think music is certainly ah because of the dopamine involved. It it is a reward um mechanism.
00:22:32
Speaker
But a pleasurable one. And ah it doesn't have to be, ah it it really just has to be how long do you want to create and the, it's my job to create an experience that's compelling enough that you want to see what happens next and see what you can do.
00:22:51
Speaker
And i think that offering that moment of, well, what, what, what can I do? Can I break it? Can I make it do something it's never done before? I mean, i would hope that the person feels like they, the parameters allow them to, to do something with it that is unexpected.
00:23:08
Speaker
Sounds like there's a lot more exploration for you to do there. i mean, I'm a little envious that I haven't experienced something like this yet. Given that I, uh, You know, I've ah studied sound and sound healing. So like we need to have more rap sessions like this, but I've got to try this out myself.
00:23:29
Speaker
You know, and one of the things that I tell my students, because I talk to them about more about social connection and how social connection is also health enhancing because it's, you know, it's part of our evolution. We're able to connect in a way that triggers our our parasympathetic nervous system.
00:23:46
Speaker
Huh. ah then this is part of the you know hacking into what makes us relax, renew, and boost basically our immune system.
00:23:58
Speaker
<unk> Then if we're able to come into the parasympathetic response, we can train ourselves what things do. This relaxation, progressive relaxation, breathing, meditation, yoga, whatever it is.
00:24:13
Speaker
But it's more like a behavioral thing. Mm-hmm. And we have studied the human brain to see that when we're playing music or really engaged, that it's a whole brain activity.
00:24:26
Speaker
whoo Music fires up the neurons all over the brain. so It does, yeah. It's a rare, ah and we should say for the audience, this is not something that every activity does. In fact, almost no activities but music connect the most ancient part of the brain with the most recent activities.
00:24:45
Speaker
in such a way that they're all communicating together. So it's a, you know, very powerful learning tool as well as a therapeutic one for people who maybe have had a ah brain injury or trying to retrain their minds to, to, um to do something in a different way, because they no longer have the capacity to do it in the way they have done it before.
00:25:07
Speaker
who Wonderful to hear about all that you're doing. As I said, I wish I could experience this. So How long do you think it'll take before more of it can experience something like this?
00:25:21
Speaker
You know, it's money, isn't it? ah I've applied to a a National Science Foundation grant. ah We're in the grant process, and i'm I'm looking at other outlets for it. It needs some development. It's a prototype, so it works.
00:25:35
Speaker
And it's out there and I have both a a digital prototype as well as a prototype that's actually a desktop. So you could literally create ah a brain that you would sit inside or multiple people could sit inside and maybe a DJ would be wearing the the headset and we'd be...
00:25:53
Speaker
feeling what's inside their brain as they're creating music and they could be triggering, you know, triggering things as they are creating the music. ah You can show the brainwaves in a number of different beautiful ways. So an artwork could be being created by people as they are,
00:26:11
Speaker
um listening and they have agency over our particular musical signature. um And that's the that's the sort of engagement that I'd really like to see developed next is a multiplayer game.
00:26:27
Speaker
And this brings us into, I'm not sure how far, how much we have left or how far we want to go into this because this is a can of worms. But yeah we just want to a wrapping flash yeah I just want to flash back for a moment to your quantified self when you were in San Francisco And I want to, you know, for our listeners, give a caveat that we are wearing all these biometric devices and we will be wearing EEG devices.
00:26:56
Speaker
um Very, very soon, EEG will be embedded into, you know, just clothing, wearable devices, etc. will be embedded and they'll be talking to one another.
00:27:08
Speaker
So our state of being will be reflected to us back. um ah you know, a lot of the time it already is.
00:27:19
Speaker
what's What's a caveat about that is that that data at the moment is going out onto the internet and can be tracked over time.
Biometric Data and Technology
00:27:30
Speaker
And I'm hoping that security protocols get to the point where our health data is not just sort of being lifted um at any given time by whomever,
00:27:42
Speaker
ah having a having ah ownership of our own biometric data is is incredibly important. So I i um encourage people to look into keeping their security of their own biometric data um in mind.
00:28:00
Speaker
The the um potential for wellness, for understanding flow states, for um having more agency over moments of presence in socially connective ways.
00:28:15
Speaker
Wonderful. um At the same time, we we have to be a little mindful of where this is headed. And I think that we can all engage in that conversation. That's not something that the powers that be engage in. We are just sort of the recipients of. I think part of this whole conversation has been encouragement of agency and creative agency.
00:28:36
Speaker
You have agency over this technology, which means you have a voice. so ah Yeah, I would like to and encourage our listeners to think about that. Yeah, really appreciate you bringing that perspective to the conversation as we're exploring techno spiritual ideas. How do we how do we grow and evolve?
00:28:56
Speaker
How do we change our thinking? How do we enhance health and wellness with our full humanness? And part of that is is our connection to sound and music, but also reconciling that there's a lot of things happening in the the fast evolution of technology. So I really appreciate you bringing that awareness to the conversation I think what you just said about humanness, um I really think that technology has afforded us or the technological interactions that we are experiencing give us a moment to think about what kind of humans we want to be.
00:29:36
Speaker
um Certainly with AI, we're having those kind of conversations. And I think this is a wonderful moment for us. I mean, change is always a little painful. And I think we are evolving as as humans um in a way that we've evolved you know several times in the past. It's not like this is entirely, entirely new.
00:29:53
Speaker
But I do think that on a personal level, It's really worth thinking about how you how you feel like you want to evolve in this very fast-paced, challenging world that we're walking into and what agency do you feel that you have? Yeah.
00:30:11
Speaker
And so i i encourage people to think of their sphere of influences as and their agency over the world and their own lives as being sort of one in the same. You can control yourself.
00:30:23
Speaker
you can You can start to have agency over the world and your sphere of influence is a lot larger than um than what you might have been led to believe.
Conclusion and Future Directions
00:30:34
Speaker
Beautiful. and Beautifully said. Really enjoyed this and this conversation, Elle. Me too. And look forward to the to the next time. Yes, absolutely.
00:30:45
Speaker
I love that you're doing this podcast and I'm i'm so excited to to hear some of the other episodes. Thank you so much.
00:31:14
Speaker
That was really a great conversation, Peter. I really enjoyed it. I couldn't be happier that we got to talk to Elle and then we got to talk to her about things that are talking about our innate creativity. That we're talking about music and how...
00:31:30
Speaker
Music, and to me, music is also like a spiritual practice. It's a way to connect. it's ah It's a pathway to developing presence. Then we got to talk to Elle about how she's creating an interface with technology by scanning scanning the brainwaves. And like one of the first things that stood out to me in the conversation was we just need a place to play without judgment.
00:31:57
Speaker
That was the first thing that really got my attention. A lot of other things too. i've been I've been thinking about the whole process of what it takes to actually play.
00:32:08
Speaker
And I can kind of relate as a amateur musician to the people who said, hey, I wish I could play, you know. And then I was thinking about why that is. And then I realized that Looking at the habits that we have as of right now, we've been pushed into the sort of a consumption culture in the sense that it's far easier to consume things rather than create things.
00:32:34
Speaker
This process of creation, as you said, when you were in the drum circle as well, it kind of sparks this connection with the people around you. And I was also very evident with the way that Elle spoke about her exhibits and how everyone was able to participate as soon as there was interactivity involved.
00:32:51
Speaker
So think creation is this kind of a hack to foster belonging and belonging is one of the primary indicators of happiness.
00:33:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think that is really true. That also was one thing that really stuck out to me in the conversation, the idea of participation versus performance and how performance tries to kind of put us in competition with each other or with people who are really good at doing something, really good at um playing an instrument or whatever their creative style output is, but really in this conversation it seemed like it's more about input, participation, that's what actually brings us together, that's what makes societies cooperate. Even when Elle talked about um the the history of how music has always been a part of who we are as human beings,
00:33:52
Speaker
It's about collaboration and cooperation, not about results or consumption, like you said, Kartik. And I think it's really quite relevant in this podcast, too. We would like to foster conversations to bring people together, not to create some sort of ah specific result, but in collaboration We can bring ourselves forward.
00:34:19
Speaker
Maybe that is what play is all about. Yeah, having a space of community, whatever the rituals are, you know, in community that bring us together.
00:34:31
Speaker
it could be music. It could be something else. In this case, um you know, Elle is talking about music, the power of music to connect. She wants people to connect, not only only to other people, but to connect to themselves, to connect to their own creativity.
00:34:45
Speaker
And and the the projects that she's working on, I feel that she's speaking passionately because she's working on something in which she feels she gives people the access to their creativity, access to musicality, but perhaps not out of an innate interest in music at all.
00:35:04
Speaker
It actually might be because people are really interested and the tech. that they're interested in. like, oh, wow, I can measure my brain waves. The project Synapsity, it's to me something sounding like human optimization as well. It's like, oh, I have the tech.
00:35:20
Speaker
I can hack in. I can make myself higher performing. And that's part of what we're learning in terms of the brain science, like how to optimize brain states. But here...
00:35:31
Speaker
What's genius, I think, is she's bringing in, oh, I can sonify that. I can make that interesting. I can make that interactive. There's another thing that she said that i that I loved. It's kind of a humorous moment, also by satisfying curiosity. Oh, what can I make it do?
00:35:49
Speaker
Maybe even the inventors, including Elle, aren't aware of what's even possible. by sonifying brain waves. And then it gets to be kind of this pathway of discovery.
00:36:03
Speaker
Like, oh, I want to be an optimized human being, but actually what I'm and and ah ending up doing is coming back to this because I'm enjoying something in terms of my creativity.
00:36:14
Speaker
It's a conversation that I didn't, you know, I had no idea where it was going to go. And in the end, I think, ah know I learned a lot. And oh yeah, I hope we can have more conversations with Elle.
00:36:26
Speaker
In general, I think I'm an optimist when it comes to technology. Um, in essence, when I was thinking about the stuff that Peter said about fed beds being all the rage back then, uh, it kind of sparked this fitness revolution.
00:36:39
Speaker
whether we realize it or not, right? Because humans really respond well to this Pavlovian effect of looking at statistics and trying to be better all the time.
00:36:50
Speaker
And I'm just hoping for a future where we can do something similar with mindfulness and things that involve your thoughts and how your brain works. Right. I mean, if the the technology becomes mainstream enough, people will be more aware of what's going on in their brains and be able to recognize thoughts as just thoughts, you know, sparking perhaps deeper introspection into the nature of their own being.
00:37:15
Speaker
Especially if we figure out a way to democratize our data in a, in a responsible manner that could also spark like certain innovations with respect to healthcare.
00:37:27
Speaker
mental health care specifically, which we haven't been that great at. And that kind of paints a very hopeful picture for me. I loved the very last thing she said, what kind of humans do we want to be?
00:37:43
Speaker
And that we have the choice with our own agency with how we protect our health data, how we interact with technology.
00:37:54
Speaker
We have the choice about who we want to be. And where we can all be part of that conversation. We can all have agency and a voice in it. And I thought that was a really powerful thing to be reminded of.
00:38:09
Speaker
Well, thanks for being my partners in this inaugural episode of Techno Spiritual Crossings. ah Thank you for adding your voices as well. To the audience, we're happy that you're here too.
00:38:21
Speaker
And we'd love to have your feedback. So please reach out, send us your comments. We'd love to hear from you so we can do this again. Remember to like, subscribe and press the bell icon.
00:38:39
Speaker
Today's podcast was produced and edited by Emily Monti, Karthik Iyengar, and me, Peter Wolfe. Original music by Heston Mims. This has been Techno Spiritual Crossings. Thank you for listening.